7 ms·

Google – you can change the game, damn it

89 points by JarekS 17y ago

jbond 17y ago
Everyone is going to flame me for this but what the hell - Dude, please.. spell and grammar check before you post stuff on your blog. There is no way you are going to be taken seriously if your content reads like a C-average high school essay.
- JarekS 17y ago
  I need some help with this - English is my second language. Can you point me to the biggest mistakes? Please?
  - petervandijck 17y ago
    ok, major mistakes: (and my corrections probably have some mistakes in them as well, this isn't easy stuff) 1. "Its" versus "It's". Its is possesive. It's means "it is". 2. "game-changing device with graphical user interface." should be "a game-changing device with a graphical user interface." Notice the "a". 3. "but it’s competitors" - you mean this: "by its competitors". Notice the BUT and the ITS. 4. "they offered cheaper version of Mac also with graphical user interface" should be: "they offered a cheaper version of the Mac which had the same graphical user interface". That's just the first paragraph :) But writing is hard, especially if it's not your native language, so don't give up.
    - JarekS 17y ago
      Thank you very much!! I'm reading the whole story once again - will try to improve it. Thanks again! BTW - I'm a startup guy. I never give up :)
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - teej 17y ago
    The only real glaring mistake I noticed was the usage of "it's". "it's" is used in almost all cases for "it is" "It's a beautiful day outside" If you want to show possession, you use "its" "Apple showed off its Iphone 4.0 update today" Don't worry, native english speakers get this wrong all the time too.
  - nradov 17y ago
    Have you tried using an automated grammar checker? The latest versions of MS Word are pretty good. I've also heard good reports about WhiteSmoke http://www.whitesmoke.com/ http://www.whitesmoke.com/ but haven't tried it myself.
    - JarekS 17y ago
      I'm using latest MS Office for Mac. I'll test Whitesmoke - thanks for the tip!
    - raffi 17y ago
      Or http://firefox.afterthedeadline.com http://firefox.afterthedeadline.com, it works in Firefox and it's open source.
      - pavs 17y ago
        I would love to see a proper chrome port for this. The bookmarklet doesn't work too good on chrome.
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    Some comments and annotations: http://crocodoc.com/yKxu2w http://crocodoc.com/yKxu2w
  - jbond 17y ago
    Can do: "Apple was almost completely destroyed but it’s" .. "Apple was almost completely destroyed by its" - proofreading would catch "but/by". "It's" is a contraction for "it is". No apostrophe is needed. "between today market situation and the past" .. "between today's market situation and the past" - "Today" is used as a possessive so it owns the "market situation". Ownership (in many cases) necessitates an apostrophe+"s". This is John's car. Tomorrow is Kate's birthday. It's a nuance that an ESL student can easily miss. In fact, rereading your entire post I see many things that are rules that can easily be overlooked by ESL students. Also, dashes ("-") should not be used for pauses unless they are being used for dramatic effect (someone will correct me on this and that's OK.) In every place where you used it (I count 4) it should either be replaced with a comma or eliminated. "Apple announced it’s newest baby – game-changing device" .. "Apple announced its newest baby, a game-changing device" "During the “PC war” there was a common platform for all the PC Clones – it was Microsoft DOS/Windows." .. "During the “PC war” Microsoft DOS/Windows was the common platform for all the PC clones." "And here we are today – Apple is not afraid of competitors" .. "So here we are today. Apple is not afraid of competitors" "we know it can be done – JQTouch anyone?" - OK "write native apps for Android – instead they should reward" .. "write native apps for Android. Instead they should reward" Just keep writing and practicing your skills.
    - JarekS 17y ago
      Thank you very much for that!
      - anthonyb 17y ago
        English is a very hard language to learn, so don't feel bad. There aren't many simple, clear rules, and it's all weird edge cases and homonyms and you have to figure out which is which from context. Everyone has to figure it out through trial and error - including native English speakers.
      - kadavy 17y ago
        This is why I love Hacker News.
    - 17y ago
  - credo 17y ago
    If you're concerned abut these flames, you could probably just add a note that English is your second language and that you're not particularly strong in English writing. Many people might already know that after reading your blog. However, the note may eliminate some flames from other people who don't think of this possibility Of course, this doesn't preclude your learning better English grammar
  - apsurd 17y ago
    I took at look at your main app page. To be honest as a one-language-only filthy American I do think twice whenever I feel the wording does not "sound right". It makes me question the quality of the product or service (however unwarranted) and makes it a lot harder for me to trust you with my money. With that said, here's a quick rewrite of some of your copy. You can use it verbatim if you like it, but otherwise I will not be offended if you think its terrible either =) ------ The Internet gives You the unique opportunity to change the way You interact with Your customers. Let's imagine you want to sell shoes on the Internet. You go to a site like eBay.com and signup. With a couple of clicks you get instant access to a huge marketplace of buyers and sellers, powerful merchant tools like payment processing, inventory management and automatic printable shipping labels; you get a complete service solution instantly. But what if you sell services? Selling & delivering shoes is not like selling & delivering services. Service-based businesses typically must deal with: -- Long, drawn-out sales cycles. -- Project delivery and continual customer communication. -- Virtual team management and subcontracting. -- Billing & invoicing - often in phases based on billable man-hours. Above all, we must be human. A service based business succeeds on the quality of human-level support and follow through. ----- Notes: I took out a lot of unecessary filler words. You don't need to put things like "we feel", or "I believe", be confident and talk as if it's fact! Also be very conscious of using "I" and "we". Replace those with "YOU" when applicable. The application, the service, the benefits, its all about YOUR CUSTOMER. YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU. Get used to writing about your customer. Hope this helps.
    - JarekS 17y ago
      you are solid gold :) Thank you very much! I'll reach you on your private email.
- OrangeGuutan 17y ago
  I was actually thinking the same...
some1else 17y ago
Let's not forget Apple first intended the apps to be Web based. Or well, at least it pushed the idea until AppStore was done.
WilliamLP 17y ago
And that brings us back again to the fact that JS, CSS, HTML5 and Canvas make up a horrendously bad development platform for the kind of apps you see on the iPhone, or even Flash. It's not impossible, if you have brilliant developers and many millions of dollars of resources like Google does, but it's much much more difficult. Ironically, a main disadvantage it has is extreme dependence and incompatibility among different browsers, and dealing with this can easily swamp the development cycle. Even performance differences across different versions of JS can make massive differences to an application. This situation shows not even a hint that it could improve in the future. Developing for iPhone, you write the app once and it will work the same on everyone's hardware. I've been modded down on forums for a couple of years consistently for pointing this out, yet you sure don't see many developers actually building complex apps using JavaScript platforms, despite the lip service given to it.
- kilps 17y ago
  That's why the article argues that Google should be releasing tools to make this development easier - a framework can deal with a lot of the inconsistencies between browsers.
  - endtime 17y ago
    Even if such a thing could cope with rendering differences, there's not a damn thing it could do about performance differences (unless it artificially slowed down everything to run as fast as the worst browser).
    - endtime 17y ago
      I didn't intend to say anything stupid here...why the downvotes? I don't care about the karma, just want to understand why I was wrong.
      - plinkplonk 17y ago
        ".why the downvotes? I don't care about the karma, just want to understand why I was wrong." Voting on HN has gone to the dogs a bit recently with thoughtless (and often mass) downvoting. There is often no real "reason" except some dumb fellow got up oon the wrong side of the bed today. My suggestion, don't worry about it, just say what you want to. By and large, good comments are upvoted sooner or later. (upvoted you btw)
moted 17y ago
Palm is already doing this with their WebOS platform. Of course nobody cares because nobody buys Palm anymore.
- wanderr 17y ago
  When Palm announced this, I thought it was a brilliant move. It took our team less than half the time to develop our WebOS app as our other native apps, and it's more stable than when they were first released. The downside is mostly performance. WebOS apps are built upon so many layers of abstraction and interpretation, they are significantly slower than native apps on the same hardware. That doesn't matter if everything your app does is trivial and not intensive, but it's pretty limiting. Chances are, our next version will have to use the native APIs that games are now beginning to use, if we can get access to them. I'm sure that if Google did the same thing, we'd end up in the same boat.
misuba 17y ago
Besides putting weight behind HTML5 as a means of making native (not native-quality, but native) Android apps, Google should be working with Adobe (and RunRev and Unity3D and whoever) too. Frankly, Flash isn't the closed platform that should frighten them anymore.
- goodness 17y ago
  Google is working with Adobe. For example, the flash player is now coming bundled with Chrome: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2010/03/improved_flash_player_support.html http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2010/03/improved_flash_pl... I also mentioned this above, but the CS5 release of the Flash IDE (due out in a couple days) is supposed to support deploying native iPhone/iPod/iPad apps. Given that Android phones already support some level of flash, this could make flash a pretty attractive option for developing cross platform apps.
dunstad 17y ago
The browser seems to be where Google is strongest, and I think they know that. Look at Maps, Translate, Gmail, Documents, even their plans for the Chrome OS. I think they combat Apple on other platforms more to antagonize them, leaving their main efforts for the web.
yanw 17y ago
PastryKit: http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/pastrykit http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/pastrykit
ecq 17y ago
Developing for the iPhone ecosystem is a win/win for both the developers and iPhone. because iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch users actually BUY apps. Developing web apps for Android is mostly a win for Google. Because mobile web apps are very hard to monetize (at least for now, mobile ads are just not there yet).
goodness 17y ago
It seems like Adobe is already filling this niche, but it has the potential to be better than HTML/JS in couple ways. First of all, you're supposed to be able to deploy native apps to the iPhone/iPod/iPad in CS5. Second, you can develop with the Flex IDE (or whatever Adobe is calling it now), which has a GUI builder, a visual CSS editor, and lots of other nice stuff.
jsz0 17y ago
A good first step for Google would be to list web apps in the Android Market. I don't expect them to drop everything and focus on web apps but they could at least level the playing field. This should probably also include some way to offer paid web apps. No clue how that would work but it's going to be an issue that has to get resolved.
c00p3r 17y ago
They already did it with their Android. It's gaining momentum with each new device available.
s3graham 17y ago
I think they're pushing there but performance and apis aren't there yet. JIT on android is on the way; adding the apis to access standard hardware bits will surely follow.
aswanson 17y ago
Google needs to expose the USB port in android. That would allow a plethora of add-on third party devices that the iPhone would never be capable of supporting.
- catch23 17y ago
  I don't think the android can output 500mA of power needed by most devices... you probably can't even power a usb mouse.
  - aswanson 17y ago
    Then just support messaging instead of power, initially, until battery tech catches up.
    - catch23 17y ago
      erm, you know that battery tech hasn't changed much in the last 20 something years right? With USB 3.0 supporting 1 amp devices, I think we'll be seeing more power hungry usb devices than ones that can run on a battery pack. Bluetooth was engineered for the "USB" of mobile devices... I don't think there's a single battery powered platform that makes heavy use of usb for these obvious reasons.
netcan 17y ago
Skeptical for two reasons: (1) Webapps for the iphone where the first apps for the iphone. Apart form the head start, the lip service, the momentum, there are already many good reasons to prefer to develop these over native apps. Yet, iphone apps are developed, bought, sold, used. That's pretty good indication that there is some advantage here. (2) Google doesn't have a business model around this. I would argue that they aren't proven in developing new business models. The 'get more people browsing' has its limits, even for Google. Microsoft had an empire to create from an OS standard. What does Google really have to gain? I know they are active in this space and putting a lot of money into it but, there is a limit to how far they can go without getting a return.
loup-vaillant 17y ago
I must say I am very sceptical about web applications. Not because of their performance. But because of their (major) privacy and data control problems. I think that will make most web applications obsolete within the decade. Things like Gmail, Facebook, Google Docs, Blogger, and YouTube will be wiped out by plug computers (provided they are made as easy to use as web apps).

89 points by JarekS 17y ago

jbond 17y ago

Everyone is going to flame me for this but what the hell - Dude, please.. spell and grammar check before you post stuff on your blog. There is no way you are going to be taken seriously if your content reads like a C-average high school essay.

JarekS 17y ago
I need some help with this - English is my second language. Can you point me to the biggest mistakes? Please?
- petervandijck 17y ago
  ok, major mistakes: (and my corrections probably have some mistakes in them as well, this isn't easy stuff) 1. "Its" versus "It's". Its is possesive. It's means "it is". 2. "game-changing device with graphical user interface." should be "a game-changing device with a graphical user interface." Notice the "a". 3. "but it’s competitors" - you mean this: "by its competitors". Notice the BUT and the ITS. 4. "they offered cheaper version of Mac also with graphical user interface" should be: "they offered a cheaper version of the Mac which had the same graphical user interface". That's just the first paragraph :) But writing is hard, especially if it's not your native language, so don't give up.
  - JarekS 17y ago
    Thank you very much!! I'm reading the whole story once again - will try to improve it. Thanks again! BTW - I'm a startup guy. I never give up :)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- teej 17y ago
  The only real glaring mistake I noticed was the usage of "it's". "it's" is used in almost all cases for "it is" "It's a beautiful day outside" If you want to show possession, you use "its" "Apple showed off its Iphone 4.0 update today" Don't worry, native english speakers get this wrong all the time too.
- nradov 17y ago
  Have you tried using an automated grammar checker? The latest versions of MS Word are pretty good. I've also heard good reports about WhiteSmoke http://www.whitesmoke.com/ http://www.whitesmoke.com/ but haven't tried it myself.
  - JarekS 17y ago
    I'm using latest MS Office for Mac. I'll test Whitesmoke - thanks for the tip!
  - raffi 17y ago
    Or http://firefox.afterthedeadline.com http://firefox.afterthedeadline.com, it works in Firefox and it's open source.
    - pavs 17y ago
      I would love to see a proper chrome port for this. The bookmarklet doesn't work too good on chrome.
- jamesbritt 17y ago
  Some comments and annotations: http://crocodoc.com/yKxu2w http://crocodoc.com/yKxu2w
- jbond 17y ago
  Can do: "Apple was almost completely destroyed but it’s" .. "Apple was almost completely destroyed by its" - proofreading would catch "but/by". "It's" is a contraction for "it is". No apostrophe is needed. "between today market situation and the past" .. "between today's market situation and the past" - "Today" is used as a possessive so it owns the "market situation". Ownership (in many cases) necessitates an apostrophe+"s". This is John's car. Tomorrow is Kate's birthday. It's a nuance that an ESL student can easily miss. In fact, rereading your entire post I see many things that are rules that can easily be overlooked by ESL students. Also, dashes ("-") should not be used for pauses unless they are being used for dramatic effect (someone will correct me on this and that's OK.) In every place where you used it (I count 4) it should either be replaced with a comma or eliminated. "Apple announced it’s newest baby – game-changing device" .. "Apple announced its newest baby, a game-changing device" "During the “PC war” there was a common platform for all the PC Clones – it was Microsoft DOS/Windows." .. "During the “PC war” Microsoft DOS/Windows was the common platform for all the PC clones." "And here we are today – Apple is not afraid of competitors" .. "So here we are today. Apple is not afraid of competitors" "we know it can be done – JQTouch anyone?" - OK "write native apps for Android – instead they should reward" .. "write native apps for Android. Instead they should reward" Just keep writing and practicing your skills.
  - JarekS 17y ago
    Thank you very much for that!
    - anthonyb 17y ago
      English is a very hard language to learn, so don't feel bad. There aren't many simple, clear rules, and it's all weird edge cases and homonyms and you have to figure out which is which from context. Everyone has to figure it out through trial and error - including native English speakers.
    - kadavy 17y ago
      This is why I love Hacker News.
  - 17y ago
- credo 17y ago
  If you're concerned abut these flames, you could probably just add a note that English is your second language and that you're not particularly strong in English writing. Many people might already know that after reading your blog. However, the note may eliminate some flames from other people who don't think of this possibility Of course, this doesn't preclude your learning better English grammar
- apsurd 17y ago
  I took at look at your main app page. To be honest as a one-language-only filthy American I do think twice whenever I feel the wording does not "sound right". It makes me question the quality of the product or service (however unwarranted) and makes it a lot harder for me to trust you with my money. With that said, here's a quick rewrite of some of your copy. You can use it verbatim if you like it, but otherwise I will not be offended if you think its terrible either =) ------ The Internet gives You the unique opportunity to change the way You interact with Your customers. Let's imagine you want to sell shoes on the Internet. You go to a site like eBay.com and signup. With a couple of clicks you get instant access to a huge marketplace of buyers and sellers, powerful merchant tools like payment processing, inventory management and automatic printable shipping labels; you get a complete service solution instantly. But what if you sell services? Selling & delivering shoes is not like selling & delivering services. Service-based businesses typically must deal with: -- Long, drawn-out sales cycles. -- Project delivery and continual customer communication. -- Virtual team management and subcontracting. -- Billing & invoicing - often in phases based on billable man-hours. Above all, we must be human. A service based business succeeds on the quality of human-level support and follow through. ----- Notes: I took out a lot of unecessary filler words. You don't need to put things like "we feel", or "I believe", be confident and talk as if it's fact! Also be very conscious of using "I" and "we". Replace those with "YOU" when applicable. The application, the service, the benefits, its all about YOUR CUSTOMER. YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU. Get used to writing about your customer. Hope this helps.
  - JarekS 17y ago
    you are solid gold :) Thank you very much! I'll reach you on your private email.
OrangeGuutan 17y ago
I was actually thinking the same...

some1else 17y ago

Let's not forget Apple first intended the apps to be Web based. Or well, at least it pushed the idea until AppStore was done.

WilliamLP 17y ago

And that brings us back again to the fact that JS, CSS, HTML5 and Canvas make up a horrendously bad development platform for the kind of apps you see on the iPhone, or even Flash. It's not impossible, if you have brilliant developers and many millions of dollars of resources like Google does, but it's much much more difficult. Ironically, a main disadvantage it has is extreme dependence and incompatibility among different browsers, and dealing with this can easily swamp the development cycle. Even performance differences across different versions of JS can make massive differences to an application. This situation shows not even a hint that it could improve in the future. Developing for iPhone, you write the app once and it will work the same on everyone's hardware. I've been modded down on forums for a couple of years consistently for pointing this out, yet you sure don't see many developers actually building complex apps using JavaScript platforms, despite the lip service given to it.

kilps 17y ago
That's why the article argues that Google should be releasing tools to make this development easier - a framework can deal with a lot of the inconsistencies between browsers.
- endtime 17y ago
  Even if such a thing could cope with rendering differences, there's not a damn thing it could do about performance differences (unless it artificially slowed down everything to run as fast as the worst browser).
  - endtime 17y ago
    I didn't intend to say anything stupid here...why the downvotes? I don't care about the karma, just want to understand why I was wrong.
    - plinkplonk 17y ago
      ".why the downvotes? I don't care about the karma, just want to understand why I was wrong." Voting on HN has gone to the dogs a bit recently with thoughtless (and often mass) downvoting. There is often no real "reason" except some dumb fellow got up oon the wrong side of the bed today. My suggestion, don't worry about it, just say what you want to. By and large, good comments are upvoted sooner or later. (upvoted you btw)

moted 17y ago

Palm is already doing this with their WebOS platform. Of course nobody cares because nobody buys Palm anymore.

wanderr 17y ago
When Palm announced this, I thought it was a brilliant move. It took our team less than half the time to develop our WebOS app as our other native apps, and it's more stable than when they were first released. The downside is mostly performance. WebOS apps are built upon so many layers of abstraction and interpretation, they are significantly slower than native apps on the same hardware. That doesn't matter if everything your app does is trivial and not intensive, but it's pretty limiting. Chances are, our next version will have to use the native APIs that games are now beginning to use, if we can get access to them. I'm sure that if Google did the same thing, we'd end up in the same boat.

misuba 17y ago

Besides putting weight behind HTML5 as a means of making native (not native-quality, but native) Android apps, Google should be working with Adobe (and RunRev and Unity3D and whoever) too. Frankly, Flash isn't the closed platform that should frighten them anymore.

goodness 17y ago
Google is working with Adobe. For example, the flash player is now coming bundled with Chrome: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2010/03/improved_flash_player_support.html http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2010/03/improved_flash_pl... I also mentioned this above, but the CS5 release of the Flash IDE (due out in a couple days) is supposed to support deploying native iPhone/iPod/iPad apps. Given that Android phones already support some level of flash, this could make flash a pretty attractive option for developing cross platform apps.

dunstad 17y ago

The browser seems to be where Google is strongest, and I think they know that. Look at Maps, Translate, Gmail, Documents, even their plans for the Chrome OS. I think they combat Apple on other platforms more to antagonize them, leaving their main efforts for the web.

yanw 17y ago

PastryKit: http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/pastrykit http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/pastrykit

ecq 17y ago

Developing for the iPhone ecosystem is a win/win for both the developers and iPhone. because iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch users actually BUY apps. Developing web apps for Android is mostly a win for Google. Because mobile web apps are very hard to monetize (at least for now, mobile ads are just not there yet).

goodness 17y ago

It seems like Adobe is already filling this niche, but it has the potential to be better than HTML/JS in couple ways. First of all, you're supposed to be able to deploy native apps to the iPhone/iPod/iPad in CS5. Second, you can develop with the Flex IDE (or whatever Adobe is calling it now), which has a GUI builder, a visual CSS editor, and lots of other nice stuff.

jsz0 17y ago

A good first step for Google would be to list web apps in the Android Market. I don't expect them to drop everything and focus on web apps but they could at least level the playing field. This should probably also include some way to offer paid web apps. No clue how that would work but it's going to be an issue that has to get resolved.

c00p3r 17y ago

They already did it with their Android. It's gaining momentum with each new device available.

s3graham 17y ago

I think they're pushing there but performance and apis aren't there yet. JIT on android is on the way; adding the apis to access standard hardware bits will surely follow.

aswanson 17y ago

Google needs to expose the USB port in android. That would allow a plethora of add-on third party devices that the iPhone would never be capable of supporting.

catch23 17y ago
I don't think the android can output 500mA of power needed by most devices... you probably can't even power a usb mouse.
- aswanson 17y ago
  Then just support messaging instead of power, initially, until battery tech catches up.
  - catch23 17y ago
    erm, you know that battery tech hasn't changed much in the last 20 something years right? With USB 3.0 supporting 1 amp devices, I think we'll be seeing more power hungry usb devices than ones that can run on a battery pack. Bluetooth was engineered for the "USB" of mobile devices... I don't think there's a single battery powered platform that makes heavy use of usb for these obvious reasons.

netcan 17y ago

Skeptical for two reasons: (1) Webapps for the iphone where the first apps for the iphone. Apart form the head start, the lip service, the momentum, there are already many good reasons to prefer to develop these over native apps. Yet, iphone apps are developed, bought, sold, used. That's pretty good indication that there is some advantage here. (2) Google doesn't have a business model around this. I would argue that they aren't proven in developing new business models. The 'get more people browsing' has its limits, even for Google. Microsoft had an empire to create from an OS standard. What does Google really have to gain? I know they are active in this space and putting a lot of money into it but, there is a limit to how far they can go without getting a return.

loup-vaillant 17y ago

I must say I am very sceptical about web applications. Not because of their performance. But because of their (major) privacy and data control problems. I think that will make most web applications obsolete within the decade. Things like Gmail, Facebook, Google Docs, Blogger, and YouTube will be wiped out by plug computers (provided they are made as easy to use as web apps).